(Photo by André Melchior – Santi Document)

At first I like to state that Technique in Latin-Dancing is by no means static. Dancing is a living thing, always evolving into new Stages. Trends come and go. After several years of more fluid-like “hovering” latin-dancing-technique, at the moment we are observing a more sportive kind of Dancing. The movements are very fast, very exact and overall its more “into the ground”.

So it´s not surprising that the Original written technique by Walter Laird (Picture left) has over the years been interpreted in many different ways.

For today we take a closer look at the “stationary samba walk” on of the Basic step combinations in (Ballroom-)Samba. (Opposing to Brazilian Samba, which is only rudimentarily related to the International Ballroom Version)

In the original writing (revised in 1998 ) the Foot and Leg Actions of a stationary Samba Walk have been explained consisting of 3 separate steps which were counted ´1 a 2´.  The timing – in beat values – is  “3/4  1/4  1”, this is because the “a” borrows its 1/4 of the beat which has gone by and the overall length of this figure is two beats.

The Actions are:

1 – Instep of left Foot closed to toe of right Foot

a – Right Foot back

2 – Left Foot slipped back

and then vice versa with ht other foot.

Walter Lairds original Article in his Book “Technique of Latin Dancing (ISBN 0 900326 21 2)” states this in a tabular form:

In addition to this the Samba Bounce Action is used throughout the whole Dance with few exceptions. The Stationary Samba Walk is not one of those.

The Bounce Action describes the Movement of Knees and Hips. It´s not exactly matching the underlying rhythm of the Footwork which makes it for beginners very difficult to perform correctly. To understand this we take a closer look at Lairds Writing (see above for citation-source) again:

This looks a little bit confusing at first. It means that you arrive on Step 1 on a straight leg (for the blink of a second) and immediately begin bending both Knees. You keep bending your Knees to the maximum extent and straightening them again. The next step commences halfway on your way to a straight leg. The Result of this (if done right) is a look similar to a not-frozen freeze effect on beat one and a fast hip kick  backwards on “a” (the so called Samba-Tick).